Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Mistral AI's Mistral Large 3 and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
| Metric | Mistral Large 3 | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Mistral AI | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.50 | $0.90 | Mistral Large 3 (44% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.05 | $0.18 | Mistral Large 3 lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.50 | $1.60 | Mistral Large 3 lower |
| Context Window | 256k | 128k | Mistral Large 3 (256k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 32k | Qwen3 235B-A22B |
| Tokenizer Family | Mistral Tekken Tokenizer (131k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Mistral Large 3 when your engineering requirements prioritize Mistral AI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Mistral Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.5/M input rate.
Opt for Qwen3 235B-A22B when looking for Alibaba / Qwen's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.